


Long Way Home

by there_must_be_a_lock



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-02-03 16:39:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12752115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/there_must_be_a_lock/pseuds/there_must_be_a_lock
Summary: Inspired by the Tom Waits song.





	Long Way Home

He meets her during a standard salt and burn. She stalks into the old house like she’s got all the time in the world and cocks her shotgun with the cool of a spaghetti Western cowboy, and Sam is hooked. Hook, line, sinker,  _ gone _ . 

When she grabs his hand and pulls him out of the dark house, her laugh echoes through the empty space like crackling summer thunder. He smiles and lets her lead him into the light. 

She’s driving an old convertible Beetle, buttery yellow, the most impractical hunter’s car he’s ever seen. Dean is looking at it like its presence next to Baby is an insult. Sam loves it. 

“I guess I’ll see you around sometime,” he mumbles. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands when he looks at her; every part of his body feels lanky and gangly and awkward as hell. 

“I got a better idea,” she says archly. “Let me drive you home.” 

Dean rolls his eyes. Sam waves to him and doesn’t look back. 

The wind whips his hair back, slapping him awake. She’s drumming along to something on the stereo. It’s definitely not the original stereo, it’s got to be at least twenty years younger than the Bug, and he has no idea where the subwoofers are hiding, but they are  _ thump thump _ ing the entire body of the car. Between that and the wind, it’s too loud to talk, so he just watches. He watches the way she smiles at certain lyrics and turns distant at others, and he wants so badly to know where she goes in those moments. 

He’d never believed in love at first sight, but he can’t breathe when she smiles. 

They hit the Colorado border, instead of the Kansas border, and that’s when Sam realizes they’re going the wrong way. He flaps his hands agitatedly to alert her and finally just turns the stereo down enough that he can shout. 

She laughs, and her eyes sparkle, and she has to shout back a couple times before he understands: “We’re taking the long way home.” 

She pulls into Garden of the Gods State Park and finds an overlook. It’s sunset, by then. She digs a beer out of the tiny backseat and hands it to him. The landscape is glowing reds and golds, the fading sunlight throwing strange shadows over the huge alien crags that thrust up from the ground. It’s beautiful. He barely gives it a second glance. 

By the time they make it back to the bunker, the sun has set and risen again, and they haven’t slept or stopped talking. Her smile crackles through him like lightning when he asks if she wants to come in for a while. 

She starts showing up, every so often. She’ll work a case with them, and then she’ll drive Sam home, and they always take their time. Sometimes they’ll disappear together for days, off to see Havasupai Falls or the Badlands or wherever she’s interested in seeing that day, and they sleep in a tent and brew bitter-strong coffee over a camp stove.

One day she sleeps over in the bunker and then she just doesn’t leave. Sam wakes up every morning expecting her to be gone. He can barely believe she’s real, let alone that she wants to stay with him for another day. 

That summer they drive out to the very tip of California, miles out into the desert, to see Salvation Mountain. They arrive at golden hour. The joy on her face when she looks out, when she reads the sloppy red letters scrawled over the hand-molded adobe, is more incredible than anything they’ve seen on their travels. Her smile shatters him into a million glittering pieces. 

That’s when he knows he’s going to marry her. Still, it takes him a few years. She’s so vibrantly alive it’s hard to even look straight at her sometimes. The idea of pinning her down, asking her to be predictable or stable or permanent, scares him more than any demon or ghost ever has. 

It’s raining and they’re somewhere along the Pacific Coast Highway when he finally finds the words. She’s waltzing around in the pouring rain and singing something slow. They can barely see the ocean through the fog, and they’re the only people crazy enough to be out in this weather. He doesn’t have a ring. He doesn’t have a plan. He’s not even sure he has a future. He gets down on one knee anyway, manages to plant his foot right in a puddle, and he has to shake his head like a dog to get his wet hair out of his eyes. 

“Yes,” she says. The word cracks into a half-laugh, half-sob, punctuated by a flash of lightning. She pulls him to his feet and kisses him hard enough to knock the breath out of him. She’s singing again, and he holds her close in some clumsy approximation of a slow dance. 

_ Come with me, together we can take the long way home.  _

_ Come with me, together we can take the long way home.  _


End file.
